Review
London Bridge Pub's Late Night Hip Happening.
The London Bridge Pub, located at the corner of Ocean St. and Adams St. downtown is a popular happy hour bar. After the suburbanites leave for the burbs, manager Ian Ranne has created a late night youth scene featuring alternative rock and avant garde music. Last Friday night, I blitzed over there to check out the action.
The combination of the London Bridge’s hip British pub atmosphere and the avant garde music is an appealing scene for young people to congregate and check out what could become the next Limp Bizkit or Yellowcard to emerge from the local progressive rock movement.
On the bill for last Friday late night was Big Evil, Seventeen After, and Bojack—bands of varying degrees of musicianship. However, this venue is a great place for musical experimentation that allows musicians a chance to try out new ideas and musical concepts on their peers.
In this milieu of anything goes, new ideas can give birth to new movements. It’s analogous to what happened in the late sixties and early seventies at the old Comic Book Club in Jacksonville, out of which evolved the southern rock sound, with groups like the Allman Brothers, Skynyrd, and the Outlaws that went on to big time careers.
That was then, this is now, and much has changed on the alternative music front. Sure garage bands from hell come and go like the tides, but sometimes a group, which captures the imagination of the youth scene in toto breaks out of the pack.
In the informal, laidback atmosphere of the London Bridge Pub, Big Evil opened the show. This duo—Michael Arnold on drums and J.T. Murphy on guitar and vocals—is strictly an experimental group trying out new ideas, some of which had momentary sparks of creative possibilities.
Drummer Michael Arnold also plays in a band called Earth Standing Still with Kevin Gibson on guitar, and Eric Walker on bass.
With J.T. Murphy, Arnold was able to try out some new tempos and rhythms. Murphy was using an alien amp, so he was getting unexpected new sounds from it. The two players succeeded in revving up the young crowd which had, by 11:30 pm, gathered to check out the scene.
Seventeen After is a more serious group which has recorded an album mastered at Inner Ear Studios in Washington D.C. The SA amalgam is: Jason Jewel on bass and vocals, Daniel on guitar and vocals, and Jason Braddock on drums with a new guy on guitar.
Clearly, these lads are experienced musicians who have chosen to pursue their original music in the progressive rock mode. In their case, the SA players have some intriguing musical ideas that play out in the context of angst driven alternative structures, which is popular with today’s restless, disenfranchised youth.
Indeed, what separates the progressive rock genre from traditional rock is its complete departure from the I-IV blues progressions, which has always been the inspiration for classic rock. Blues and classic rock are kissing cousins.
Today’s progressive rock is modal sounding with the chord structures arranged in new and different patterns, which may sound alien to lovers of blues. Nonetheless, it comes off as being darker and much more dense, characterized by buzz-saw like power chords and new and interesting guitar tones achieved by foot pedal effects. Vocals are more like shouting diatribes.